High moments of the SHE in the clustering regimes

Abstract

We analyze the high moments of the Stochastic Heat Equation (SHE) via a transformation to the attractive Brownian Particles (BPs), which are Brownian motions interacting via pairwise attractive drift. In those scaling regimes where the particles tend to cluster, we prove a Large Deviation Principle (LDP) for the empirical measure of the attractive BPs. Under the delta(-like) initial condition, we characterize the unique minimizer of the rate function and relate the minimizer to the spacetime limit shapes of the Kardar–Parisi–Zhang (KPZ) equation in the upper tails. The results of this paper are used in the companion paper [75] to prove an n-point, upper-tail LDP for the KPZ equation and to characterize the corresponding spacetime limit shape.